Thursday, 12 October 2017

Movie Review: Purple Sunset

China, August 1945.

Two days after the atom bomb was dropped on
Hiroshima, and in accordance with the Yalta agreement, the USSR declared war on
Japan and invaded northern China, the Japanese puppet state of “Manchukuo”, and
Korea. This act, it has been persuasively argued, was far more devastating to
the Japanese war effort than the two atom bombs, and was the single
precipitating factor that forced Japan’s surrender.

The vaunted Japanese Kwantung Army – the largest
and most prestigious of all Japanese army groups – shattered like porcelain
before the Soviet onslaught. As the Japanese forces in China dissolved, and the
world war ended, two other wars began. One was the Chinese Civil War, which had
been interrupted by the Japanese invasion a decade earlier but now broke out
again in full force. The other was the Cold War, which – as anyone knows, and
all pretences otherwise notwithstanding – is still going on to this day.

That is history. But there is much more to
history than just the headlines.

The Japanese war crimes in China and Korea
are among the most astonishingly underreported and unknown things about the
Second World War. As the Japanese advanced through China in 1937, raping,
killing, and destroying (not necessarily in that order) everything in their
path, they began an odyssey of sadistic violence which far exceeded in cruelty
and numbers anything achieved by the Nazis in Europe outside the USSR. A
quarter of a million civilians were massacred in Nanjing after the Chinese
capital had fallen. The entire Korean peninsula was turned into a source of slave
labour for Japan, administered by Korean turncoats. The Japanese medical
experiment centre, Unit 731, murdered more people, in more depraved ways, than the
German Nazi doctors like Josef Mengele (“the Devil Doctor of Auschwitz”) ever
did – and got away with it, in fact being rewarded with positions in US
universities in return for handing over their experimental data.

There is an excellent reason why to this
day if there is anything China and the two Koreas agree on, it’s their mutual hatred
of Japan and their determination that Japanese militarism must never be allowed
to raise its head again.

And yet to this day Japan, while
acknowledging its war crimes against Western prisoners of war* does not admit
or acknowledge what it did to its fellow Asians. And for some reason that
undoubtedly has absolutely nothing to do with Cold War imperatives and
anti-Korean/anti-Chinese strategy, the West has never attempted to compel it
to.

[*In The
Other Side Of Tenko, his memoir of life as a Japanese prisoner of war from
1942 to 1945, Len Baynes specifically mentions that while the Japanese were
bad, if “half the tales told by some of our men about the way they treated the ‘wogs’
were accurate, British colonial policy between the wars was as bad as the Japs
at their worst.”]

Acknowledged or not, the war crimes were real
enough. And as the Soviet tank divisions slashed across the plains of Manchuria
in August 1945, crushing the Kwantung Army under their tracks, the Japanese
army turned on the Chinese in one last orgy of violence. Civilians of all
descriptions were swept up, casually murdered, and their corpses dumped in
rivers; machine gun squads massacred entire villages before the Soviet forces
could reach them; and young Japanese, many of whom had absolutely no desire to
participate in this war in any way, were jammed into uniforms, informed that it
was their duty to die for the Emperor, and sent off to do their share of
killing.

This is the story of three people during
those days of August, seven decades ago.

Yang is a Chinese peasant in his late twenties or early thirties. When
we first see him, he is among a mass of Chinese civilians, roped to each other
and being marched along to be slaughtered by a Japanese machine gun squad in
front of a wall. The rest of the civilians are murdered, but before Yang
himself can be killed, Soviet forces which have broken through the Japanese
lines arrive and annihilate the Japanese. Yang, the only survivor, is put into
an armoured personnel carrier along with Soviet wounded and a female medical
officer, and packed off to the Soviet headquarters somewhere along the shifting
frontline.

As we see later in flashback (the backstory
of all the three main characters is revealed in flashback) Yang is in this
position because his home was invaded by Japanese troops on one of these
murderous missions. All they found were
Yang himself, and his aged mother, whom they tied to posts. The officer in
charge ordered one of his young troops (a bespectacled schoolboy scarcely
taller than his rifle) to bayonet the old woman, and beat him until, face
covered with blood and tears, he complied.

While other Chinese dead were being
tossed into a river in sacks – or being burned alive for sport – Yang and other
survivors were marched off to be shot. As the only survivor of his village,
Yang literally has nothing left.

The armoured personnel carrier has, as I
said, a female medical officer. This is Nadia,
whose Russian is so clearly enunciated that I could understand almost all of it
without needing subtitles. Her
flashback reveals that her son was killed in a Nazi air raid when a shot down
German plane crashed into the playground he was in. And that is it for her
family as well.

As the armoured personnel carrier tries to
look for the headquarters among unmarked roads in the North Chinese plains, the
driver takes a wrong turn and blunders into a Japanese base. In the ensuing
firefight, all the Soviet troops are killed except Nadia and the driver. They
and Yang manage to escape into the forest, and decide to try and find their way
back to the Soviet lines. In the middle of unknown territory, this is easier
said than done.

Walking through the forest, they come to a
bridge, on the other side of which is a guardhouse. It’s apparently deserted,
but as the driver crosses, someone inside throws a grenade at him. He
retaliates by riddling the guardhouse with submachine gun fire, and kicks down
the door to find...two Japanese schoolgirls. One of them commits suicide at the
sight of him with a bayonet, but he captures the other. And, deciding that she can
be their guide out of the forest, they take her with them, gagged and at the
end of a rope. Her name is Akiyoko.

Flashback: Lines of young people in the
rain, girls on the left, boys on the right, listen as a Japanese officer
screams at them about how they are all “soldiers” now, not students, and their only
duty is to kill their enemies and die for the Emperor. Akiyoko, whose father
has been conscripted and likely dead, and her lover, Onishi, are in different
lines, listening. Shortly after, he is taken away along with other recruits
while Akiyoko, slipping and sliding in mud, runs after them, crying. But the
lorry vanishes in the distance, leaving Akiyoko standing in the mud, and soon
afterwards it’s her turn as well.

As the four march through the wilderness,
they get into a minefield, and the Soviet driver is killed. Nadia and Yang,
suspecting Akiyoko of having deliberately led them into the minefield, nearly
kill her, but finally decide to spare her for the moment. At this point they
all speak to each other in different languages: Russian, Mandarin, and
Japanese, which create further confusion. They save her again, when she falls
into a quagmire, and then, when a crashing Japanese aircraft starts a forest
fire, she saves them by creating a firebreak – and reveals in the process that she
speaks fluent Mandarin. It seems that she’s lived in China since the age of
four and does not even know for certain that Japan is across the sea.

In a Western film, the plot would be
straightforward from this point. The two older people, Yang and Nadia, would
fall in love, and they’d adopt Akiyoko, and the three of them would live
happily ever after. This is not a Western film, and the story is much more
complicated than that. It is full of tender moments, as suspicion wavers and recedes, but never goes away; and spots of hope - but whose hopes are they? Can a Japanese girl have the same hopes as the Chinese her nation has massacred, and can a Soviet soldier have the same hopes as the two of them?

No, it's not a Western film, and so it marches inexorably towards a dramatic and tragic conclusion. What that is I won’t
tell you, but the film is right here, so you can watch it for yourself:

I love this film. I think it is superb, and
almost as good as the Soviet film Come
And See, which I rate the best war movie ever made. I find it incredible
that it is not famous. I can only speculate that this is because it’s a Chinese
movie about Japanese war crimes, which means that it’s dead on arrival as far
as the Western media are concerned.

The acting is excellent from all three main
leads, with nuance and expression. Most of the Japanese soldier parts are overacted, but given the film
that is excusable. The direction is good, and the scenery is indescribable. There are a few historical inaccuracies – while there was
one last Japanese kamikaze attack after the surrender, the planes were flown by
volunteers and never hit any target, much less an American aircraft carrier –
and Japanese hand grenades of the period did not work in the way depicted in
the movie. These are not important quibbles.

I strongly recommend that you watch it.

[Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5. I never give 5 out of 5 because nothing is perfect.]

2 comments:

In 1984, Oceana keeps switching from an ally of Eurasia to an ally of Eastasia and back again. That did NOT sound like the world I grew up in, but Orwell was British, allied with Russia from '14 - '17, then alone, then, after Russia became the CCCP, more allied with Germany as the best protection against the Communists (since Adolph said he was a rabid anti-Communist), then, after '39, at war with Germany, and the CCCP was Germany's ally (but not at war with the UK). Then allied with the CCCP against Germany. Then after '48, allied with West Germany against the CCCP.

I belonged to a group and presented a link to a paper that nuking Japan was not justified. The person who is considered the world's greatest expert on everything, Baslim, said that was a proven lie. 'Show me the proof,' I wrote, and was condemned by 3 members of the group who said everyone would leave unless I was evicted. I tried to explain what 'proof' actually meant, but they all knew that, if Baslim says it (or Obama or St Hillary) that's irrefutable proof, nothing else needed. So I departed without being evicted, since no one would read anything I posted.

So I checked. After Japan's unconditional defeat, some Japanese historians wrote (with a gun to their heads) that the nuclear bomb was Japan's salvation. Other Japanese historians strongly disagreed (after the US occupation ended). Modern historians are split.

When I was in grade school, the Germans and Japanese HAD been unspeakably evil, until the US single-handedly won WWII, hanged all the evil Japanese and Germans, and taught the rest to be good. We read about the Rape of Nanking (spelling has been changed, but it was Nanking in my history books).

As early as '53, "The Young Lions" tried to make the overwhelming majority of Germans into Adolph's dupes, good people who were misled into thinking they were doing the right thing (and who had no idea about the concentration camps).

Anyway, sounds like a VERY good film, and I'll try to watch when I have time.

Recently, a paper appeared saying that British colonialism 'was both “objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate” in most places where it existed.' http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01436597.2017.1369037?needAccess=true&instName=University+of+Cambridge

Many of the members of the board of the journal where it was published resigned, since it was supposed to be an historical journal, and the 'history' in that article was up there with Irwin's Holocaust Denial. http://www.arcre.org/colonialism-was-a-disaster-and-the-facts-prove-it-the-conversation/

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